Performance Analysis: Till When An Art?

Jesus Labarta, Polytechnical University of Catalonia (UPC), Spain

Current practice in performance analysis tends to be based on aggregated
numbers from which understanding the actual behavior of the system is difficult.
The cost of obtaining and processing such performance data often refrains
developers from performing detailed analyses.

The objective of the talk is to discuss some of the issues (flexibility
to compute and display performance indices, precission, scalability, instrumentation
overhead, methodology) that contribute to the current situation and how
they are tackled within the Paraver tools set. This environment supports
extremely detailed analysis of the performance of parallel (MPI, OpenMP,
mixed) applications and systems.